“But I played well… didn’t I?”

Backgammon can be a cruel game, and live tournament play is probably the most cruel. You can sit down for your first round all hopeful, take an early double, get blitzed and find yourself first to get unceremoniously knocked out, with plenty of time to twiddle thumbs until consolations start. You can play your heart out, grind away one point at a time to get to a tense final, establish a decent lead in the double-match-point game, then watch helplessly in dismay as your opponent rolls double after double to just squeak home. But I played so well… didn’t I? Didn’t I deserve to win?

To tournament novices: don’t let that put you off trying – the euphoria of, say, pulling off a tough backgame to whip a trophy from under your adversary’s nose makes up for many hard-luck stories!

For some time there’s been a growing trend among top players to record games and take them home to pick over, looking for lessons to learn. This has been helped along by video camera technology becoming cheaper, and camera stands evolving from something that would make Rube Goldberg proud to unobtrusive purpose-built kit. Running the game past your favourite bot can at least help answer the question of how badly the dice treated you.

Big Brother is kibitzing you (Akiko Yazawa v John Broomfield in Monte Carlo; photo thanks to London Open BG)

This idea gets taken to its logical conclusion this month with the first UK tournament run by the Backgammon Masters Awarding Body (some have already happened in Austria and Japan). Twelve players – including your author – get to play six 11-point rounds with every match recorded, transcribed, and analysed by eXtremeGammon, and the results published for all to see. We therefore end up with both a tournament winner, decided in part by the whims of those evil dice, and a “best player” judged by eXtremeGammon’s Error Rate – for the uninitiated, a measure of how often and how badly you make mistakes – with every likelihood that they turn out to be different people. Titles from Intermediate right up to Super Grandmaster can be also be awarded based on objective standards.

You can do your worst but you can’t touch my Error Rate!

I must admit to being rather apprehensive about my blunders being laid bare, and I have no idea at the moment if my play over the board in tournament conditions is better or worse than online – although it really ought to be better than live in the pub, pint in hand! But I’m really looking forward to a format which guarantees a full weekend of actual play, where every move and every touch of the cube matters, and where I’m competing against myself as much as anyone else. Here’s hoping for many more to come.

The format of the tournament is a 12 player truncated round-robin where each player plays three rounds of 11-point matches each day, such that six rounds will have played at the end of the tournament. All matches will be played in accordance with the current version of the UKBGF tournament rules, including the requirement for game clocks, which will be set at 22 minutes bank time and 12 seconds delay for each match. Moreover, all matches played will be recorded and subsequently transcribed to electronic match files which will then be analysed by the current version of eXtremeGammon.

Players will be provided with standardised BMS(UK) tournament score cards which will inform each player who they must play in which particular round and on what specific table. Players are required to follow strictly the sequence and table positions specified on the tournament score cards. This is particularly important in enabling proper control of the match recording process.

The tournament will start at 1200 on the first day, and re-start at 10.30 on the second day. All other rounds will have an earliest start of 90 minutes after the start of the previous round or a latest start of 10 minutes after the end of the slowest match in the previous round.

If you accept the invitation it is imperative that you commence and complete the tournament, as a late cancellation will ruin the whole format for all participants. Consequently you are required to send a £30 deposit which will only be refunded where players complete the tournament and then complete the required transcription work. Please make payment through paypal to rick.janowski@ntlworld.com.

At the end of the tournament, players will be provided with 3 match videos recorded on data dvds or memory sticks which they will be required to transcribe within the next 7 days with match files subsequently sent to us by email. Players may use third parties to perform this function. The £30 deposit will be retained until match files are returned but only within the 7 day cut-off date. Players will be refunded £10 for each match transcribed within this period, together with data dvds of their own matches. Those players who do not wish to carry out transcription work, may be interested to know that a third party match transcriber will perform this function for the very reasonable fee of £22.50 for three 11 point matches. Details will be provided on request.

All match files from the tournament will become public domain material and the complete results of the tournament will subsequently be reported/ submitted to the Backgammon Masters Awarding Body (BMAB). Matches will be analysed using the current version of eXtremeGammon (XG) using the following settings: Standard World Class Analysis but with “Gigantic” search interval, 15 x 8 bearoff database, and resignation errors counting.

At tournament registration, players will pay a £30 registration fee and pay £25 entry fee into a prize pool, which will subsequently be distributed as follows:

67% Tournament Winner

33% Tournament Runner up

There will also be an optional £25 entry side pool for the PR prize.

The criteria for determining the tournament winner and runner up will be based primarily on number of match wins. If a tie breaker is required then the results from the matches involving the players with the least number of wins will be removed from the analysis and the number of wins for the remaining players recalculated. This process may be repeated until the winner and runner-up positions are determined.

The PR prize will be awarded to the player with the lowest aggregate PR, determined from the completed XG player profiles, which weighs the PR from each match against the number of decisions made. The PR prize cannot be awarded until all the matches are transcribed and then analysed. Consequently, it is anticipated that there will be about a two week period between completion of tournament and the award of this prize.

Hotel rooms may be booked, at a single flat refundable rate of £45 per night (whether single, twin, or double occupancy) by phoning the front desk on 01509-678000, choosing option “5” and asking for the “BMAB room rate”. There is an additional cost of £5 per night for use of the car park. For guests arriving by train the closest station to the hotel is East Midlands Parkway. To get from the station would require a taxi; the usual cost for this is £10.00 for a standard size vehicle. The hotel recommends Village cars (Tel: 01332 706020) as offering the most competitive rates. The other option would be for guests to take the train to Derby. From this station the Skylink bus can be caught which runs right past the hotel at a cost of about £4 one-way (for bus time tables: https://www.trentbarton.co.uk/services/skylinkderby/maps-and-times).

Breakfast is free for all guests at the hotel. A group dinner is also available at a special price of £15 for two courses for a group of 8 or more (either Starter & Main, or Main & Dessert). Guest may choose any of the menu items (except there would be a supplement of £3.00 for the Rump Steak entrée). Copies of the menu are attached, though it is expected that some minor changes will occur before the date of the venue.

The playing room will be available from early evening Friday to early evening Sunday, so there will be plenty of opportunities for Warm-ups, Jackpots and other side-action. The hotel will provide hot beverages and bottled water free on as part of the room hire.

I would ask participants to confirm whether they will attend the tournament and answer the following questions:

1.Do you intend to arrive of Friday or Saturday?

2.Do you wish to participate in the Group Dinner deal on Friday or Saturday or both (please be specific here so we can assess numbers)?

3.Are you able to bring a laptop, notebook or notepad computer that could be used to record matches?

4.Are you able to bring a memory stick of capacity 16GB or more?

5.Are you able to bring a suitable Chess Clock?

I hope all participants will enjoy the challenge of the tournament and its new format.

An excellent article by Julia in my opinion! I would like to make a few comments regarding the choice of PR as the key criteria in assessing player performance levels.

In the ideal world, player performance would be based on results-based criteria such as win-rate or Elo rating, but in reality the luck factor in backgammon is so large that a player will need perhaps 10-20 years of statistics to give a level of reliability similar to that in Chess Grading systems. Even if this data was being gathered and analysed, the gratings would be old news representative of how well players played 5 to 10 years ago rather than current performance levels.
The majority of technically knowledgeable backgammon players accept that the only practical means of providing a robust and reliable method of grading is through average-PR or Variance Reduced results related criteria, with the former generally being considered preferable for providing an international standard (the VR method may work well for local populations but is problematical for an overall global approach.
This leaves PR as the only practical means of providing a measure of player strength with the level of definition needed to distinguish the range of playing standards. Of course it isn’t perfect but then again nothing is. But it is the best means currently available. This also appears to be the view of majority of most of the known top players in the World.

“Playing well” and “Making the same play that XG would make” are not always the same thing although of course they can be. Judging players by their PR ignores the key skill of adapting your play, particularly with the cube, to take advantage of the difference between your skill levels. An XG blunder, even a triple whopper with fries scale blunder, can be quite correct over the board if you are taking notice of how well your opponent plays generally and what type of mistake she makes typically. By all means record all matches and publish the analysed results, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the purpose of the game is to win it, not play with as low a PR as possible.

Indeed – measuring errors by what XG does isn’t perfect, and ignores the ability to exploit fallible opponents, but at the moment it’s probably the best objective standard we have. And I totally agree that winning should still be the ultimate aim. It did prompt me to think, to what extent will trying to play low-PR backgammon influence the game. Will players with marginal decisions tend to pick the play that leads into more familiar, and so less error-prone positions? Would there be situations where you might deliberately give up equity now in order to reduce the scope for blunders later? That issue could easily be several blog posts in itself…

I think it’s worthy of a very short blog posting, something along the lines of “get a life” 🙂 Ok so PR bragging is part and parcel of backgammon now, which is fine – but really if someone goes to that much effort as to deliberately alter their plays, or shorten games in order to obtain a lower one, they’re welcome to it….
I’ll see you down the pub after you’ve finished getting your ‘I’m a PR World Megastar’ framed certificate 🙂

I think you may have missed an element of Socratic Irony here. BMAB/BMS(UK) specialist tournaments generally adopt formats where winning matches is still the fundamental consideration. Similarly, individual applications comprise matches taken normal tournaments.

Although in playing for minimum PR a player may on occasion wish to be on the losing side, it does not follow that the player should steer towards such positions because this would almost always involve a sequence of significant errors. This notion that playing for minimum PR involves fundamentally different strategies from the optimal winning strategy is generally overblown, except perhaps in cases where there is significant disparity in player strengths. In such cases, where a player needs to adjust to adjust, the effect on long-term average PR is not of major significance.

It is very easy to criticise and mock, without suggesting a viable alternative. But I am not sure how much this approach benefits the debate.

Rick – the only element being ‘mocked’ if you want to put it that way, was the idea that a player would somehow try to deliberately ‘play’ for a lower PR, which as you’ve confirmed yourself is pretty much impossible from a technical point of view, and also even if you could it would be a pretty sad way of approaching a game…..as a means of measuring player strengths there isn’t really a ‘viable alternative’ to suggest to PR figures. I think different tourneys like the BMAB/BMS(UK) ones with a PR ‘element’ are great and if it was in Scotland I’d have loved to have gone gone myself 🙂 I think the PR thing is good to have as a ‘extra’ prize, and also to see stats of some of the the top players, however i don’t know if it would be good if a tournament, say had any kind of seedings, byes, results decided by best overall PR. You can easily have a few 11 point matches where a majority of your moves turn out to be of the ‘easy to play’ type and get a sub 3.0PR without making any technically demanding plays, whereas someone else might have their 11 pointers filled with numerous backgames, nightmarish cube decisions and generally have a much harder game, get most of the plays right and end up with a well earned 5ish PR??

Thanks for the clarification. I should clarify that to obtain masters and grandmasters titles it is necessary to have a fairly large number of matches and this generally increases with the importance of the title. These requirements for experience were debated by an international advisory panel comprising 21 top players and promoters, and subsequently voted on. Clearly a PR measured from 3 or 4 matches is unreliable.

BMAB/BMS(UK) do not have a policy regarding seeding but it might make sense where a number of grandmasters are playing to help even up the playing field for all players. The tournaments invariably adopt swiss and round robin type formats where each player plays the same number of matches, so there are no byes.

The tournament’s venue is within the East Midlands complex. Direct flights from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Eire are available at very completive prices (£70-90 return). Flights are available in this range currently where you could travel out Friday or early Saturday morning and fly back Sunday evening.

cheers Rick – thanks for the info & hopefully can make a future one! It’s more a case of how many of these backgammon events I can ‘get away’ with, before I get into trouble with the other half…..
“mmm yes dear I really do have a business conference in Monte Carlo this year” 😉 😉

Everyone who gets upset or disappointed that they lost to a worse player, or to a player who got a bunch of jokers, ought to ask themselves how it feels to be Mochy, or Falafel. They lose most of the tournaments they enter, and sometimes in the first round. And except when they play each other or one of the very few other mortals that can play near their level, they outplayed their opponent. Simply put, if you can’t handle these losses, you shouldn’t be playing backgammon!

The best baseball player in the world only gets a hit one out of three times. That means he has to accept the fact that 2/3 of the times he goes to bat he will fail. And yet, he’s the best there is!

Success in games of skill that also have an element of chance can only be measured by long-term results. When Mochy or Falafel win a match but played poorly, I can assure you they are far more upset than when they simply lose to a worse player. There have been some very fine players who did not have the mindset, and they no longer play backgammon.

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Featured Event

West Yorkshire Open

Date: 22-24 March, 2019Venue: Clayton Village Hall, Bradford

The opening of the 2019 UK Tour, with a prize fund of £7000. Paul Gilbertson Memorial warm-up event with added prizes, Swiss Saturday leading to knockouts on Sunday. Plus doubles, Super Jackpot and 1-pointers.